This invention relates to parking garages for automobiles and similar vehicles. More particularly, the invention relates to a multistory parking garage of such simple construction that it can be quickly assembled at a minimum expenditure of labor and money, and which occupies only a small area of ground.
With the growing commercialization of available land, especially in urban areas, and the attendant increase in land costs, the use of large areas of such land for parking automobiles is an uneconomical operation from the standpoint of monetary return, and yet the aforementioned commercialization has created an increasing demand for parking space. It is obvious, therefore, that a more economically desirable result can only be achieved through the use of multistory parking garages.
In the past there have been numerous designs of multistory parking garages. One such design is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,330,083 of E. Jaulmes, which discloses a multistory garage having first and second central portals which define a loading elevator shaft and third and fourth portals which define the outer limits of parking cells extending outward from two sides of the central shaft area. Each cell constitutes a floor pan for holding a vehicle, and all of such floor pans, each defining a parking cell, are suspended from suspension cables running from the top of the structure to the bottom thereof. Such a structure is, in some respects, more complex, especially in the use of cables, than is necessary for most uses. In addition, the risk of a cable failure is always present, and the failure of just one cable could be catastrophic, since large numbers of cells are held in place by such cable. In addition, the structure has numerous cells side-by-side on each level, necessitating the use of an elevator either moveable in a lateral direction or large enough to bring a vehicle in line with any given storage cell.
In U.S. Pat. No. 1,815,429 of J. L. Canady there is shown a parking garage having inner upright numbers forming an aisle for a vertically and horizontally moveable elevator, and outer uprights defining the outer ends of the parking stalls. Joists running between the inner and outer members support the pans which in turn support the vehicles, each pan supporting a single vehicle. Again, the parking cells extend outward from only two sides of the elevator shaft, since the elevator has to move horizontally to deliver vehicles to individual cells.
One multistory garage that does not use a horizontally moveable elevator and, as a consequence, has parking cells extending radially outward from the elevator shaft is shown in German patent No. 1,129,274 of Kann et al. This garage, while compressing the total area in which cars are stored by means of the radially extending parking cells, nevertheless relies on a complicated turntable elevator to bring each vehicle in line with a cell.
A multistory garage structure using conveyor belts to move the cars transversely from the elevator to the parking cell is shown in French patent No. 1,585,920. Such a structure is quite complicated and comparatively expensive.
In all of the foregoing designs, the elevator must be moveable in more than one direction, i.e., a direction other than the vertical, in order to place the vehicles in line with the parking cells, or, in the case of the French design, conveyor belts must be used between elevator and cell to accomplish the same end.